Last year, Austrian director Ruth Beckermann was at the Berlinale with Mutzenbacher, a documentary for which she asked various Austrians to read out loud from a scandalous 1906 pornographic novel. She’s back at the festival this year – but her new film couldn’t be any more different to its predecessor.
Favoriten (which opened Berlinale Encounters and is sold by Autlook) is set in a primary school in Vienna. It follows a class of kids from the ages of 7 to 10 over a three-year period. Most are from tough backgrounds. Few have German as their first language.
“All of my films are very different,” Beckermann protests at the idea that there is anything unusual about her embracing such a wide range of subject matters. Her 2016 film The Dreamed Ones focused on the romance between poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, expressed in their correspondence. The Waldheim Waltz(2018) profiled the controversial Austrian politician Kurt Waldheim, notorious for his Nazi past. It is fair to say, then, that she never makes the same film twice.
“I am interested in exploring the margins of documentary forms,” Beckermann states. She describes Favoritenas “a more or less straight documentary” but one of its attractions for her was that it was so unlike Mutzenbacher which preceded it.
The impulse to make the new doc came from the director’s anger about the school system in Austria and Germany. She doesn’t like the way kids are “divided” at the age of 10. Nor is she happy about the lack of support given to children who haven’t grown up speaking German.
“We were visiting a couple of schools. I wanted to make a film about an elementary school – a typical one for Europe today which means there are kids from many countries with many languages and so on.”
The director eventually found a school in Favoriten, the 10th district of the city.
“It’s the biggest elementary school in Vienna. There are almost 1000 kids in this school – and there is not one kid whose both parents speak German,” Beckermann observes. “The question is do these kids [get to] learn the language they need in school or not. That is the problem.”
Ilkay is the teacher whose class the documentary focuses on. She is a tireless, wise and kindly young woman who always has far too much to do. She works hard to create a safe and nurturing environment for the pupils.
“I am happy about the teacher and I am happy about the kids. But I hope you understand that this sympathetic and energetic teacher is covering [the cracks]. You can see that she has to do everything. She has to teach sport and photocopy the sheets they give the kids…she translates for the Turkish mothers who don’t speak German and so on. She doesn’t have help.”
In a better world, Ilkay would have help from a secretary, social workers, translators, psychologists and classroom assistants. Instead, she does everything herself.
In order to capture classroom life on camera, Beckmann put her cinematographer Johannes Hammel on a chair with wheels. That meant he was at the right height to film events from the children’s point of view. (When he wasn’t in the chair, he was often kneeling instead). The classroom wasn’t big. There was little space to move around. The director herself sat in a corner, keeping out of the way.
“You never knew which child would talk and so you had to have some telepathic ability,” Beckermann says of one obvious challenge of working with kids. She insists, though, she went into the project without preconceptions. “I just wanted to observe and learn something.”
Every day brought surprises. For example, she was startled to hear small boys say things like ‘women should wear what their partner or husband tells them…or no bikini or no swimming for women.’
“That is not easy to swallow. But on the other hand, it was surprising how much small kids know about the world. They know about war. We don’t listen enough to kids. They absorb a lot and they have their own reflections and ideas.”
Ilkay, the teacher, is a patient listener. She always does her best to draw the kids out and to take their opinions seriously.
Unlike adults, the kids don’t hide their emotions. “It was such a pleasure to work with them because they are so open, so soft. They’re not finished yet…their faces and their hands, everything is still a little bit baby-like…of course, when we see a film, we always project our own fantasies. Here, you can have your fantasies about every kid. What will happen to this boy? Will this girl become a teacher or a nurse or just a housewife?”
The head of the school liked the filmmakers and was keen for them to make the documentary. “He was the intermediary between the parents and us,” she remembers.
Ask the director about her own school days in Vienna and she says that when she was growing up, things were very different. In her class, there were no immigrant children. “There were many kids of Nazis! We had different problems then…and the cross in every classroom, they prayed every morning, the Catholics.”
In certain ways, the children of her generation were just like the ones she has been filming. “Kids are curious and kids fight. They observe – they are very good observers,” she says of some traits that need to change and others that should be encouraged.
The kids were fascinated at having filmmakers in their midst. They were intrigued by the cameras and microphones. “It was exciting for them to be in a film.”
Beckermann and her team stayed at the school for three years. “For them [the kids], moving images are Tick Tock or YouTube,” she acknowledges that they weren’t always sure what the documentary makers were doing.
She calculates that she and her team shot around 100 hours of material – far more than on most of her other films. She analysed the material carefully, working out which kids to foreground. “You cannot follow 25 children. There are 5 or 6 that you keep in mind.”
The structure, though, was straightforward. She was following the “chronology” of the school year and the pregnancy of the teacher.
Favoriten will be released in Austrian cinemas in the early autumn. (Filmladen is the distributor). It has also been chosen by numerous festivals after the Berlinale. The director hopes that it will spark a debate about the school system in Austria. She wants politicians to see and debate it.
“I am not naive. The school system is one of the most difficult to change because there is so much of a class struggle involved…the elites don’t want these kids to move up in society. They want them to be cleaners and so on. But I think for our society, that is very bad. We need better educated people for hospitals, IT and so on. It’s a very old fashioned, conservative, nationalist idea to keep them where they are…”
